You cannot outbid
your way in.
Based in downtown Minneapolis. Managing paid search for firms here and in selected markets nationally.
Somebody in your market always has a larger budget. Winning is a narrowing problem: fewer case types, tighter geography, and a landing page that matches the query well enough to convert at a rate they cannot reach.
Hourly management, invoiced weekly. No percentage of spend, so nobody profits from spending more of your money.
$85/hr. Billed weekly. Ad budget goes to the platform, not to us.
Several auctions,
and they behave differently.
A legal results page stacks lead-based ads over click-based ads over the map over organic. Firms that treat all of it as “Google advertising” end up paying twice for the same click and reporting on neither properly.
Local Services Ads
Google verifies the firm and its attorneys before the badge appears, and you pay per lead rather than per click. That changes the whole optimization problem: the lever is lead quality disputes and responsiveness, not bid strategy.
Search Campaigns By Case Type
One campaign per case type, not one campaign for the firm. Different case types carry different values, different competitors and different conversion rates, and averaging them together hides the two that are funding the other six.
Landing Pages, Not The Homepage
A dedicated page per campaign, message-matched to the ad, with the phone number fixed and nothing competing with it. Pointing paid traffic at a general practice-area page is the most expensive habit in legal advertising.
Law firm web designNegative Keywords As A Discipline
Job seekers, students, people looking for free representation, people researching how to handle it themselves, and the name of every competitor running a brand campaign. In a category with expensive clicks the negative list is worth more attention than the keyword list.
Scheduling Around Who Answers
There is no point buying clicks at an hour when nobody picks up. We set the schedule against the firm's actual answering capability first, then expand it once after-hours coverage exists, rather than paying for leads that go to voicemail.
Budget Pacing You Can Read
What was spent, on which case type, in which market, and what came back. Not a dashboard screenshot with an upward arrow on it. If the spend is not producing signed cases we would rather say so early than let it run because the contract renews.
Ad Copy Your Firm Clears
Attorney advertising rules apply to a thirty-character headline exactly as they apply to a web page, and ad copy is written fast and reviewed rarely. We draft it, your compliance lead approves it, and the approved set is what runs.
Handoff To The Organic Plan
Paid data is the cheapest keyword research available. The case types that convert in the auction are the ones worth building organic pages for, so the ad account informs the SEO roadmap rather than running beside it.
Our law firm SEO serviceBeat them on relevance
because you cannot beat them on budget.
A smaller firm competing on the same broad terms as the largest advertiser in the market loses slowly and expensively. Every lever below trades reach for a conversion rate the broad bidder cannot match.
Fewer case types, deliberately
Pick the two or three you actually want more of and can staff, and stop advertising the rest. A firm that advertises everything competes with every advertiser in the market at once and gets outspent in each of those auctions separately.
Geography tight enough to matter
A statewide radius spends most of the budget on people who will retain someone closer. Bidding the counties where the firm genuinely has standing, presence and referral history costs less per click and converts at a materially higher rate.
Intent over volume
Somebody typing a specific situation is further down the road than somebody typing the practice area, and costs less to reach because fewer advertisers bothered to write an ad for it. Those queries are individually small and collectively where the winnable volume lives.
Optimize toward cases, not conversions
Automated bidding optimizes toward whatever you tell it a conversion is. Tell it a form fill and it will find you cheap form fills from people you would never sign. Feeding the retained-client outcome back into the platform is what points that machinery at revenue.
Sometimes the answer
is not to advertise yet.
Paid search is the fastest channel to turn on and the easiest to waste. There are three situations where we will tell a firm to fix something else first, and we would rather say it on a discovery call than three months into an engagement.
The first is intake. If calls go to voicemail after five and forms are read the next business day, ads will buy leads that a competitor signs. That is a staffing or answering-service decision, and it has to come before the spend.
The second is the site. If the page the ad points at loads slowly on a phone, buries the phone number, or reads as a brochure rather than an answer, the auction will charge you full price for a visitor who leaves. Building the landing pages is cheaper than the clicks they waste.
The third is budget honesty. A market where the going rate exceeds what a firm can sustain for the six to eight weeks it takes to gather usable data is a market to enter narrowly or not at all. Spending a month's budget in nine days and calling it a test tells you nothing.
Senior work, weekly invoices,
no percentage of spend.
Discovery Call
Fifteen minutes. Which case types, which counties, what happens to a call after hours, and what the budget can actually sustain.
Account Audit
Search terms report, wasted spend, conversion definitions, landing page match, and whether the ads are competing with your own organic listings.
Build And Launch
Campaign structure, negatives, tracking, and one landing page per case type before a single click is bought.
Weekly Invoices, Monthly Read
Hours line by line every week. Once a month, spend against signed cases by case type, and an honest call on what to cut.
Fifteen minutes
to a real read.
Bring your search terms report and last month's spend. We will tell you what is being wasted and whether paid search is even the right place for that money right now.
Frequently Asked Questions
About Law Firm PPC
$85 per hour for the management, invoiced weekly, entirely separate from your ad spend. No percentage of spend, which is the pricing model that quietly rewards an agency for spending more of your money. Build-out is usually 20 to 40 hours. Ongoing management for a single-market firm is typically 8 to 20 hours a month.
Usually both, but they are not interchangeable. Local Services Ads sit above the search ads, charge per lead rather than per click, and require Google to verify the firm and its attorneys before the badge appears. Search ads give you control over the exact query, the message and the landing page. Firms with a thin caseload and no verification yet often start with search; firms already verified usually find the lead-based auction easier to defend.
Because a single signed case can be worth more than a year of clicks, so every firm in the market bids accordingly. The competitive answer is almost never to outbid. It is to narrow: fewer case types, tighter geography, exact-match intent, and a landing page that matches the query closely enough to convert at a rate the head-term bidders cannot reach.
Yes, and we would rather not run a campaign without them. Sending paid traffic to a general practice-area page is the most common reason legal PPC underperforms. One page per case type, message-matched to the ad, is usually the single largest improvement available on an existing account. See our law firm web design work.
Signed cases, not clicks and not form fills. That means call tracking wired per campaign, form submissions pushed into the case management system with their source attached, and where the firm can support it, importing the retained-client outcome back into the ad platform so bidding optimizes toward cases rather than conversions. A campaign can look excellent on cost per lead and be losing money.
No. $85 an hour for the hours worked, and your ad budget goes to the platform. Percentage-of-spend pricing means the agency earns more when it spends more of your money, which is a conflict of interest sitting inside the working relationship.
Where we work in the Twin Cities
Headquartered in downtown Minneapolis. Dedicated landing pages for the suburbs we work in most often.
Plus Wayzata, Saint Louis Park, Richfield, Hopkins, and the broader 7-county Twin Cities metro on a project basis.
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Other Industries We Serve
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